I.Summary

In some ways Samira M.'s situation, described above, is
better than that of many other Moroccan child domestics. Some studies estimate
that almost a third of child domestics begin working before their tenth
birthdays, making Samira. M. relatively old when she first started work. She
also had significantly more education than most child domestics, having
completed part of seventh grade before her parents withdrew her from school
because her family needed the additional income of a full-time job after her
brother became unable to work. A 2001 study of child domestics in Casablanca found that more
than 83 percent had never attended school and were illiterate. Samira M.'s age
and her education may have made her somewhat better able to protect herself
from abusive employers, although they also may have contributed to her family's
assessment that she was "old enough" and "educated enough" to be sent to work.
"Other children in the family go to school," she told us. "I work because I am
the oldest girl."

In many other important ways, Samira M. is typical of the
current and former child domestics Human Rights Watch interviewed. The majority
worked fourteen to eighteen hours per day, without breaks, seven days a week,
for salaries between 0.4 dh to 1 dh ($0.04 to $0.11) per hour. In comparison, Morocco's
minimum wage for other forms of non-agricultural work is 9.66 dh ($1.07) per
hour, and working hours are limited to forty-four hours per week and ten hours
per day. Like Samira M., almost no child domestics received their salaries
directly or had a say in how that money was spent, leaving them effectively
working for food, lodging, and in some instances small amounts of pocket money
or clothing.

Also like Samira M., the majority of domestics we interviewed
experienced physical and psychological abuse from their employers, including
beatings and threats of beatings for working slowly or performing chores badly.
In two instances domestics we interviewed also reported sexual harassment by
employers or employers' family members.

Morocco
has one of the highest rates of child labor in the Middle East and North
Africa, and one of the lowest rates of school attendance for working children
outside of sub-Saharan Africa. According to a
2004 study of child labor in Morocco
by the International Labour Organization (ILO), the United Nations Children's
Fund (UNICEF), and the World Bank, child domestic workers are "perhaps the most
vulnerable group of urban child workers," and urban child labor poses the
greatest dangers to children's health and well-being.[2]
Yet the government has given little emphasis to combating the worst forms of
child domestic labor. Few programs exist to prevent children from entering
domestic labor or facilitate their rehabilitation and family reintegration, and
child domestics with abusive employers have little effective legal or other
recourse. The scope of Morocco's
Labor Code excludes domestic workers, and labor inspectors lack the authority
to enter private homes to investigate violations of the general prohibition on the
employment of children under fifteen. Police, prosecutors, and judges rarely
enforce Penal Code provisions on child abuse or on forced labor in cases
involving child domestics, and parents are rarely willing to press for time-consuming
prosecutions that will subject their daughters to stigma without providing any
direct benefit to them. NGOs, social workers, and other private parties lack
legal status to insist on access to a child working in a private home when they
suspect she is being abused.

Most child domestics with abusive employers simply put up
with abuse until a major holiday or religious festival provides them with an
opportunity to return home. The bravest and the most desperate may, like Samira
M., take a chance and run away. There is little middle ground between these two
options. Most child domestics work in cities at some distance from their rural
homes, and have only infrequent contact with their families. When family
members do visit girls at their workplaces the visits are typically short and
sometimes are monitored by employers, giving girls little opportunity to
convince families who depend on their incomes that the abuses are severe enough
to warrant leaving the job. Girls considering running away from abusive
employers typically face multiple barriers as well: lack of money and knowledge
about how to return home, employers' threats of violence, denunciation to
police, and restrictions on girls' movement, and girls' own fears of getting
lost or attacked if they left their workplace combined to keep several child
domestics we spoke with working against their will for abusive employers. Nor
were girls' fears unreasonable: child domestics who fled abusive workplaces
described breaking down in tears on the street and in train stations or
sleeping on the street, penniless and unable to return home without help from
strangers.

The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) prohibits
economic exploitation and the employment of children in work that is likely to
be hazardous, interfere with their education, or be harmful to their health or
development.[3] Domestic
work by children under such conditions also ranks among the worst forms of
child labor, as identified in International Labour Organization (ILO)
Convention No. 182, the Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention. Under that
Convention, children under the age of eighteen may not be employed in work
which is likely to harm their health, safety, or morals. Prohibited labor
includes work that exposes them to physical, psychological, or sexual abuse;
forces them to work for long hours or during the night; or unreasonably
confines them to their employers' premises.[4]The Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention
requires states to take immediate and effective measures to protect all
children under age eighteen from the worst forms of child labor and to ensure
the rehabilitation and social reintegration of children already engaged in such
labor.[5]Morocco
has ratified both of these treaties.

The Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention also prohibits
the trafficking of children and their forced labor. Under international law,
forced labor is work or service extracted by menace of penalty and without
consent. Those who recruit, transport, transfer, harbor, or receive a child for
the purposes of forced labor are considered to be traffickers. While not all
child domestic labor situations in Morocco meet this test, Human Rights Watch
believes that there is ample evidence that enough do to warrant prioritizing
child domestic labor in Morocco's programs for the elimination of hazardous
child labor and for combating trafficking.In addition, Morocco should demonstrate its commitment to combating all
forms of trafficking by becoming a party to the preeminent international treaty
on trafficking, the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in
Persons, Especially Women and Children, supplementing the United Nations (U.N.)
Convention against Transnational Organized Crime.[6]

Methods

This report looks at child labor by girls under age eighteen
who perform household tasks while living with their employers. Young girls
engaged in child domestic labor are referred to as "petites bonnes" in Morocco,
a term without a specific age cutoff but which is meant to differentiate
between them and older girls or women engaged in domestic labor. We place
special emphasis on the treatment of girls under fifteen in this report because
girls in that age group are most vulnerable to abuse and least likely to have
the emotional, cognitive, and social resources to remove themselves from an
abusive situation. In recognition of this vulnerability, both international law
and Moroccan law prohibit children under fifteen from working.[7] In
addition, international law prohibitions on hazardous labor, forced labor, the
sale and trafficking of children, labor that interferes with education, and
unconditional worst forms of child labor apply to all children under eighteen.[8]

We assess the treatment of child domestic workers according
to international law, as set forth in the CRC, the Worst Forms of Child Labour
Convention, and other international human rights instruments. These instruments
establish that children have the right to freedom from economic exploitation
and hazardous labor, the right to freedom from trafficking for forced labor,
and the right to an education, among other rights.

Our findings are based on field research conducted in Casablanca, Rabat,
and Marrakech in May 2005, and follow-up phone and electronic mail contacts
through November 2005, as well
as a review of previous studies and statistics on child labor prepared by
Moroccan and international governmental and nongovernmental bodies. During the
course of the research we spoke with fifteen current and former child domestic
workers; educators working with child domestics; staff from ten Moroccan NGOs
working in the field of child labor; officials from the Moroccan League for the
Protection of Children (Ligue Marocaine
pour la Protection de l'Enfance, LMPE); the Moroccan Ministry of Employment
and Professional Development; the Moroccan Secretariat of State for Family,
Solidarity, and Social Action; the ILO's International Programme for the
Elimination of Child Labour (ILO-IPEC) program officer in Morocco; and UNICEF's
child protection officer in Morocco. In some instances educators and NGO staff
who critiqued government policies asked that they or their organization not be
cited by name to avoid potential retaliation against them or their
organizations.

Human Rights Watch interviewed child and adult domestic
workers outside their workplaces. Almost all of the domestics with whom we
spoke had worked in more than one household, and many had worked in quite a few
before their eighteenth birthdays. Unless noted otherwise, the situations and
events cited in this report occurred while the domestic workers were under
eighteen years old. The names of all domestic workers have been changed to
protect their privacy and avoid potential employer retaliation. In this report,
in accord with the CRC, "child" refers to anyone under the age of eighteen.[9]

This is Human Rights Watch's ninth report documenting abuses
against domestic workers, including migrant workers, both children and adults.
We have documented such abuses in El Salvador,
Guatemala, Indonesia, Malaysia,
Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Togo, and the United States (U.S.).
It is also our twenty-eighth report on child labor. To date we have
investigated bonded child labor in India and Pakistan, the failure to protect
child farmworkers in the U.S., child labor in Egypt's cotton fields, abuses
against girls and women in domestic work in Guatemala, the use of child labor
in Ecuador's banana sector, the use of child labor in sugarcane cultivation and
abuses against child domestic workers in El Salvador, child trafficking in
Togo, the economic exploitation of children as a consequence of the genocide in
Rwanda, and the forced or compulsory recruitment of children for use in armed
conflict-one of the worst forms of child labor-in Angola, Burma, Colombia, the
Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, and Uganda.

[7]See ILO Convention
No. 138 concerning the Minimum Age for Admission to Employment ("Minimum Age
Convention"), adopted June 26, 1973, 1015 U.N.T.S. 297 (entered into force June
19, 1976, ratified by Morocco on January 6, 2000), art. 2(3); and the Moroccan Labor Code, as amended by dahir
no. 1-103-194 of September 11, 2003, Official Bulletin No. 5167 of December 8,
2003, (entered into force June 8, 2004), art. 143. The Minimum Age Convention allows an exception to the minimum age of
fifteen only for a state "whose economy and educational facilities are
insufficiently developed," which may "initially specify a minimum age of 14
years." Ibid., art. 2(4). Morocco
set the minimum age of employment under the Minimum Age Convention at fifteen,
but did not amend its Labor Code to raise the minimum age from twelve to
fifteen until 2003, and those amendments did not become effective until June 8,
2004.

[9]The Convention on
the Rights of the Child defines a child as "every human being below the age of
eighteen years unless under the law applicable to the child, majority is
attained earlier." Convention on the Rights of the Child, art. 1.